The Internet provides access to a wide variety of information. For example, digital image files, video and/or audio files, as well as web page resources for particular subjects or particular news articles, are accessible over the Internet. With respect to web page resources, many of these resources are designed to facilitate the performing of particular functions, such as banking, booking hotel reservations, shopping, etc., or to provide structured information, such as on-line encyclopedias, movie databases, etc. Search engines crawl and index these resources to facilitate searching of the resources.
Furthermore, with the advent of tablet computers and smart phones, native applications that facilitate the performance of the same functions facilitated by the use of web page resources are now being provided in large numbers. Additionally, native applications that do not have corresponding websites with similar content, such as games, are also very popular on tablet computers and smart phones. Accordingly, search engines now also facilitate searching of these native applications.
One process by which search engines gather information for native applications is by accessing “deeplinks” for native applications. A deeplink is an instruction specifying a particular environment instance of a native application and configured to cause the native application to instantiate the environment instance of the specified native application when selected at a user device. The native application generates the environment instance for display within the native application on a user device. For example, a deeplink may be a URI that specifies a particular native application, resource content that the native application is to access, and a particular user interface that should be instantiated when the native application is launched by use of the deeplink. For example, a deeplink may specify a selection menu for a game environment; or a particular selection of a song for a music application; or a particular recipe for a cooking application; and the like.
Search engines now also facilitate searching of these native applications. A user's informational need may thus be satisfied by search engines providing search results that identify either one (or both) of a particular web page resource that describes a native application, and search results for the native application itself.